Working Drafts

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Several years ago, I hurt my back. Sciatica pain is no joke. Walking became the fix. I started most mornings with an hour of loops around the park or laps on the YMCA’s indoor track. It became my routine.

This year, I decided to make it official. I set a goal: 1,000 miles. I tracked every walk using a simple setup—Apple Watch for the movement, Soulver for the math. I liked that it stayed out of the way. No social layer. No badges. Just numbers adding up, quietly.

I built a small dashboard to track it all. Nothing fancy. Just a record of the miles, the days, the streaks. A reminder that small, boring consistency adds up.

I usually went out between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. and walked for about an hour. Toward the end of the year, I had to stretch some days longer to make up ground. December became a stretch of seven-mile mornings. Earlier in the year, four miles had been the average.

Walking does something reliable for me. It loosens my back. It clears the static. It gives my brain just enough movement to think without spiraling. The surprise this year was how motivating the 1,000 mile goal structure became. Seeing the numbers accumulate made it harder to quit on myself. I had a couple of low stretches—spring and fall especially—where I would have normally drifted off and stopped entirely. But the goal was there, quiet and patient, waiting.

So I kept going.

I’m proud of the accomplishment and excited that January 1 is only a few days away and I’ll be starting the tally all over again for 2026.

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Three walks worth reading

You Are Here

David Nicholls

Goodreads ›

Open City

Teju Cole

Goodreads ›

Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir

Craig Mod

Goodreads ›

New York Times:

David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72.

Sad news. I never was able to visited Tekserve while it was around, but even when I was a kid, it felt mythical. I'd seen pictures and read about it on early Apple forums and imagined it as a kind of Little Rascals clubhouse for people like me that loved computers.

I miss when Apple Stores — and tech shops in general — felt closer to that spirit. Less polished. More human. Tekserve hilariously even showed up in an episode of Sex and the City.

If you'd like to know what it was like, you should read the novel Laserwriter II by Tamara Shopsin. One of my favorite reads.

Everything I know about Lerner is secondhand, yet the legacy is unmistakable.

LaserWriter II

Tamara Shopsin

tamarashopsin.com ›

Jon Hicks launched a new site last week that hit me in a way the internet almost never does these days. It’s about the band Stars of the Lid and it’s called Stars of the Lid Forever. He describes it as “a fan-led project to archive their live recordings”. No subscription push. No tracking. No hustle. Just a guy building a home for something he loves.

He also wrote a short blog post about the project. Worth a read. It captures the odd electricity that runs through a very specific obsession.

One of the shows he archived was the April 22, 2008 set in Champaign. Inside a planetarium. I was there and I don’t think I’ve experienced anything quite like seeing Stars of the Lid with a full dome show spinning above us. Jon asked if he could include the poster I made for it. That print was the first screen printed gig poster I ever designed. As a kid who spent hours a day scanning through the original gigposters.com, that was quite a milestone for me. Still the one people mention most often when they look through my work. They like the scooter guy.

In early 2008 I was a year into designing show posters and quarter-page newspaper ads for The Canopy Club. The office sat in the middle of the University of Illinois campus. Parking was expensive and limited, so I sold my car and bought a 50cc scooter that looked like it had been designed by a toy company. It could carry groceries under the seat. Chinese takeout lived in the backpack. I remember riding it to the AT&T store the morning I bought the first iPhone, then heading straight back to the Canopy office to jailbreak it so I could swap the icons and wallpaper. I felt like my life was finally doing something interesting. I was working in the middle of the hyper buzz of a live music venue while there were also so many exciting things going on with the web and technology before the technology and web made us all so isolated and lonely.

Working on my new site this week and digging through old files has me feeling a little nostalgic. Remembering who I was when I made that poster. 2008 was a wild little window. My first year working on what was then called Pygmalion Music Festival. Yo La Tengo headlined. I was full time at a music venue and working with Seth at smilepolitey.com and doing some other related things. I was learning how to make things that meant something to me and maybe to other people too. I also made four or five prints that year.

It’s funny how a fan project can pull you back into the version of yourself who thought anything was possible. It reminded me what I cared about back then. And maybe pointed a little at where I should aim myself now.

Luminal

Beatie Wolfe x Brian Eno

beatiewolfe.com ›

New to me, out since June 2025. It’s the third piece in a tidy little trilogy. Liminal, Lateral, Luminal. The covers are each gorgeous in that mind-short-circuit way. I stayed with it and found that the music has been this great low-level, stabilizing hum on my morning walks recently.

This also reminded me that Eno, along with Peter Chilvers, was involved in making one of my favorite iOS apps, Bloom. Back in the very early days of the App Store, this app was a mainstay on my iPhone home screen.

I also recently rewatched the Brian Eno scored documentary, "For All Mankind", a few months ago. Chills.

Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks

Brian Eno, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois

Listen on Apple Music ›

Working Drafts*. A blog. Or whatever we call these things now that “blog” feels so old fashioned.

Sharing things in public has never come naturally to me. Outside of the design work I have done for other people, I am not especially present online. But a corner of the internet I actually own, my domain, my files, my words, feels a little magical. No platforms. No algorithms. In 2025 this format feels both incredibly archaic and, for someone who grew up on the early web, weirdly correct.

Wax Era is the home for my design work first, so there is really no pressure for this blog to become anything huge. Let it be loose. Let it become whatever it becomes. That seems like the only sane way to start.

I decided to set a few guardrails, mostly to keep myself from drifting into places I do not want to go:

• No thought leadership. No guru posture. Nothing that smells like a TED Talk or LinkedIn evangelizing.
• No forced cheer about how I am crushing it.
• No SEO tricks, no cross posting, no algorithmic manipulation.
• And no confessional oversharing. I want to be human and present without sliding into melodrama.

What I do want is a home for the things I am drawn to. You can see the rough set of topics in the sidebar, which will give you a sense of what is coming. There will be design talk. There will be some sports, mostly from the angle of uniforms and visual identity. There will be posts about computers and software. I read a lot and also am interested in the design of book covers, so that will show up here as well. In short, there are many interests I hope to carry through to this space.

So this is the starting point for the experiment. I will end this first post with a quote from one of my favorite novelists, Douglas Coupland, from his book Life After God. I am sure he will come up again here before long.

“I have always tried to speak with a voice that has no regional character—a voice from nowhere. This is because I have never really felt like I was “from” anywhere; home to me, as I have said, is a shared electronic dream of cartoon memories, half-hour sitcoms and national tragedies. I have always prided myself on my lack of accent—my lack of any discernible regional flavor. I used to think mine was a Pacific Northwest accent, from where I grew up, but then I realized my accent was simply the accent of nowhere—the accent of a person who has no fixed home in their mind.”

Life After God

Douglas Coupland

Goodreads ›

Bartlett Giamatti, in his book Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games, wrote…

“Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

Giamatti, the former commissioner of baseball (and someone whose baseball card I once owned), is also the late father of actor Paul Giamatti, who starred in one of my all-time favorite movies, Sideways.